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Why people collaborate to achieve their political objectives is one enduring question in public policy. Although studies have explored this question in low-intensity policy conflicts, a few have examined collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts. This study asks two questions: What are the rationales motivating policy actors to collaborate with each other in high-intensity policy conflicts? What policy actor attributes are associated with these rationales? This study uses questionnaire data collected in 2013 and 2014 of policy actors from New York, Colorado and Texas who are actively involved with hydraulic fracturing policy debates. The results show that professional competence is the most important rationale for collaborating, whereas shared beliefs are moderately important, and financial resources are not important. Policy actor attributes that are associated with different rationales include organisational affiliation and extreme policy positions. This article concludes with a discussion on advancing theoretical explanations of collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts.

The extent of political fragmentation of metropolitan areas impedes effective land use planning in many countries, and thus contributes to the phenomenon of urban sprawl. For some metropolises in the United States and Europe, strategic interaction between local policymakers codetermines the implementation of local planning policies. However, previous empirical analyses of this phenomenon have usually assumed interdependence in planning decisions to be confined to neighbouring jurisdictions. This is a common simplification in research on diffusion in public policies. Proceeding on the assumption that municipal zoning decisions are subject to competition between municipal authorities trying to attract new residents, I suggest an alternative conceptualisation of location-choice competition in Tiebout-like economies: the correlations of out-commuting patterns serve as a proxy for the degree to which municipalities are competitors for mobile residents, irrespective of their contiguity. Spatial autoregressive models, estimated on the basis of a large panel of fine-grained zoning data, reveal that zoning decisions in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland’s most dynamic metropolitan area, are indeed subject to such interdependence.

Scholars of morality policy change primarily analyse state regulation. Through this narrow focus, they ignore private actors and their varying engagement across time and policies. We contribute to this research gap by comparing and explaining private actors’ involvement in euthanasia and prostitution policy in Germany. We argue that the extent of private engagement is determined by the private actors’ capacity to govern, governmental decision-making barriers and private actors’ interests. Thus, the present study makes an empirical contribution to the literature on private governance by exploring largely disregarded policy issues that are least-likely cases for the delegation of public regulatory competence. Furthermore, it adds to the morality policy literature in a theoretical way by showing that policy change in this field is not only a question of scope, timing and direction but also one of the types of governing actors.

Research on bureaucratic power typically focusses on rulemaking and policy implementation, while bureaucrats’ participation in the legislative process remains underexplored. We theorise and test a specific mechanism by which bureaucrats attempt to sway legislative outcomes, which we term indirect bureaucratic lobbying. Using a novel survey of state-based health lobbyists in 25 states, we show that state Medicaid agency staff routinely request lobbying assistance from provider associations and consumer advocates. We also provide the first systematic evidence of the conditions under which indirect bureaucratic lobbying is likely to occur. Our results suggest that individual-level policy agreement interacts with institutional factors, most notably agency performance and gubernatorial power, to increase the likelihood that bureaucrats will use this strategy to attempt to influence legislative deliberations.

State-level income tax policy is a hotly debated topic in both academic and political spheres. Although economic theory and some empirical analyses suggest that larger income tax burdens affect migration decisions, there is also a good deal of empirical evidence showing that tax policy has little to no effect. This lack of consensus in the academic literature is echoed in the political world, where many states are debating whether to eliminate income taxes or reduce rates as a means of spurring economic growth. Connecticut’s adoption of an income tax policy in 1991 provides a unique opportunity to analyse the impact of a sizable income tax policy change on migration. The results suggest that Connecticut’s income tax deterred movement into the state but had no impact on exit from the state, resulting in a net loss in migration.